Stories

Fundry.com is a new crowdfunding platform from the makers of bugmenot, retailmenot, cushycms and trendsmap, that helps developers get paid for developing new features, and enables a community of funders to contribute to get the features they want. Win win. Find out more at fundry.com.

Jason Goecke published an article on the Tropo blog showing how to build a real-time web application using EventMachine and Tropo. He also provided a video from a pretty neat, interactive music project from Montreal, which used cell phones, a sound system, and high-output projectors.

Stuart Knightly posted a link on Hacker News with a demonstration exploiting a XSS attack on GitHub. He let them know about their problem at some point ahead of its release (and the issue was quickly fixed). While it worked, hovering over his commit message opened a light box where you were promptly Rickrolled.

Kristian Mandrup wrote in to let us know about Cream. Cream is a set of generators which integrates Devise, Can Can, and Roles Generic into a Rails application and it supports ActiveRecord, DataMapper, MongoMapper, Mongoid, and CouchDB.

Aviv Ben-Yosef put together a post describing how he uses puppet to manage his Amazon EC2 instances. It covers a couple of gotchas he ran into, specifically with certificate validation and master DNS entries.

Quines are an interesting software application whose sole purpose is to print its own source to the screen. Sounds simple, but generally, it's not. And that makes it especially amazing to see that Yusuke Endoh posted a Ruby quine which not only works, but its source is also ASCII art. And, ASCII art that moves, at that!

Last week, a Reddit thread was opened asking what the biggest, current problems were in the Ruby community. And, the Reddit community still feels as though Ruby is too slow, has memory bloat, and that the community projects need better documentation. While we can't really agree on the first couple issues, the last is something we can certainly keep in mind going forward.

When it comes to Rails documentation, if you don’t have the time to contribute yourself, Ryan Bigg started up a Pledgie so that you can donate to his Rails documentation effort. If having proper documentation on Rails is important to you, show him some love.